


The Art of Clapping With One Hand

by Spylace



Series: Odachi [6]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 20:12:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15736542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: Mukuro hates the Mafia for what they’ve done but he might make an exception for Yamamoto, just a little one.





	The Art of Clapping With One Hand

When a man lies with a witch, two outcomes can result. The first may be that the couple will remain barren and the witch will soon fly away with his youth, mourn him when he is dead and buried in the cold, hard ground. The other may be that they will produce a daughter who will be lost to the father the moment she draws breath into her perfect little lungs—for who wishes to admit to the world that he has lain with a woman who is not a woman at all?

So the reluctant son, motherless, loved, but unwanted is brought up as a foundling or a cuckoo’s chick in an honest man’s home. He will be the bane of his father’s existence and a needle in his stepmother’s eye. Most likely, he will die young, felled by a stray arrow or poisoned with a gentle slip of the hand. His mother will mourn him when she finds him absent, she might even remember him as she does her dozen lovers in the years preceding him. But the son of a witch is still a child of her body and fruit of her loins; the magic exists in his blood unexpressed and dormant, seeping through his life stream like ether.

People begin to ask then, what of the male child then, what of the son? What if men too were born as witches?

 

Ken says he can smell the blood in the water and Mukuro wonders what he means. Sometimes the blonde can see things that they cannot see; it is the legacy of the Estraneo family they have all been imparted with, much like how Mukuro is a witch but a male, M.M., a girl, who has been turned into a witch. Chikusa hasn’t a daemon and can lie no longer and Nagi is a stray they pick up, a natural witch born to non-witch parents.

There’s a storm coming—Ken’s Kohaku says solemnly.

There is not a spot of cloud in the sky.

The wolf daemon rolls in the grass and drinks the damp from her grizzled pelt. Ken joins her, wrestling with her like they are children who have never known hardship. Avila lets out a small tsk in irritation, burrowing herself down Mukuro’s collar. He absentmindedly pets the smoky flicker of her tail, contemplative.

 

Approximately sixteen months after their escape from the Estraneo facility in Nigata Prefecture, they encounter Yamamoto and Koujiro in the trees, looking for a baseball that had flown astray. When their eyes meet, a bolt of electricity spirals down his spine; it is as though a primitive part of their collective brains have been set afire.

Breath rattles in Avila’s serpentine throat as she breathes caution into her words, excitement seeping through. And as Yamamoto drops down to the foot of the spindly-limbed tree, a baseball in one hand and the baseball mitt tucked under one armpit, they know they are not alone.

 

Yamamoto suffers through Ken and Kohaku’s inspections in good humor, laughing and asking them if they are new. His daemon is slightly more suspicious, deigning only to speak with Dante and Martius who have wings enough to reach him. M.M. swears an oath and Nagi—Chrome—agrees, the other boy is saturated in the magic of witches.

Later when Hibari Kyouya corners them on the school rooftop, swaggering with the confidence of a predator at home in his territory, he knows for certain that they are dangerous, that someday they will grow up to be the kind of breed that began the terrible providence of awakening a witches’ blood in the sons of men.

 

“You are polluting the air.” Hibari flashes his teeth in warning, his daemon unfurling her barred quills in a stunning display. “Leave.”

There is trace-magic in the other teen’s form, the way his blue eyes turn violet at a certain angle, and the way he knows where the next blow will fall. But a storm is coming and blood is in the water. At this point in life, Mukuro is too young and stupid to read all the signs. But he knows it is important to stop Hibari in any way he can.

A stag bursts onto the rooftop in a canter with his head held high, his many-armed antlers resting heavy against his spine. In the entrance to the stairwell is Yamamoto beside a pale-haired hanger-on with bronzed skin. Avila weaves and dances beneath the other daemon’s cloven hooves, Hibari’s Tamizuki roars in anger at the interference and digs her teeth in the stag’s ankle.

Mukuro takes advantage of the momentary distraction and throws Hibari against the rooftop fence. The mesh of wires gives way beneath the upperclassman’s weight.

Hibari falls.

Yamamoto doesn’t hesitate as he hurdles himself over the broken fence, his daemon screaming after him. Mukuro only sees the spread of wings as he drops out of sight.

 

Hibari’s recovery is swift, enough to put a tonfa through the wall. Though his movements are graceful, his interaction with others no more or less caustic than before, the damage has been done. Tamizuki constantly stays close enough to touch. Whether they heal with their distance bond stretched or cut entirely remains to be seen.

In another ward, Yamamoto rests on his belly, his hands buried beneath his pillow. He greets him and Avila with surprising cheer even as his daemon puts on his best disapproving face.

The doctors are optimistic on both outcomes. They may have saved Hibari from a certain death but an eagle was never meant to carry a man never mind two. Koujiro's talons sheared through flesh when they ripped through his shirt, shredding muscles and nerves, laying his bones bare.

“Got any milk? The nurses won’t give us any.”

Mukuro sets down a fruit basket on the bedside table.

“There is probably a very good reason for that.” Avila points out dryly, coiled around his waist.

“Probably” Yamamoto chirps, his daemon a jeweled frog on the back of his thigh. “We’re thirsty though and the hospital water tastes bad.”

“I thought Hibari Kyouya wouldn’t have settled for anything less than perfection.”

From where they are standing, Mukuro cannot see Yamamoto’s expression. But his daemon slowly bleaches out into a shade of gold before flushing tomato red. Blue and green dot his spine and suddenly he is a wolf with cool blue eyes. He steps carefully all around his human half, feet placed protectively on all sides. “Mukuro,” he rumbles like a daemon settled, “the next time we see you, we will kill you.”

Mukuro smiles understandingly and sees himself out.

 

The next time they cross paths, they are twenty-five and twenty-six respectively. As promised, the first time they lay their eyes on him, Yamamoto tries to kill him using a butterfly knife they snuck through security. Mukuro dodges barely, several strands of hair lost as Avila lands hard on the floor when the other man’s daemon makes a bid for her head.

Only when he is pinned down with a gun at his head does Yamamoto stop, his daemon shifting back into an innocuous greyhound with doe-like eyes. Outside the office where they determine Yamamoto’s fate, Mukuro lazily makes a call. The Vongola’s Sun Guardian is full out doubt at his voice, vehemently denying Yamamoto’s capture in Thailand. Mukuro’s only regret is that he will not be there when Hibari receives the news.

 

Yamamoto is like a deep-sea angler freed in a tropical community. He sticks out like a sore thumb among the Italian populace of the Vongola headquarters, his daemon flaunting his youthful shifting wherever they go. Neither says much in the way of words anymore, not even when Sasagawa Ryohei arrives to assess the situation under the tenth’s very nose.

 

The Japanese man receives the task of a Rain Guardian but none of its honor.

“Mafia” Avila hisses spitefully and Mukuro agrees. But his relationship with the Vongola family is tentative at best, like a slow poisoning of the son who is not supposed to exist. He only stays because Chrome is here and Chrome, because he remains, captured in a strange paradox which makes no sense staring from outside in. The Vongola likes to keep its enemies close and he wonders, not for the first time, if this is how it recruits all of its guardians—the Mist, the Sun, the Cloud and the Rain.

Almost too years into Yamamoto’s enforced captivity, he proposes to him out of the blue, Avila sulking in the tepid weather, the sticky damp disagreeing with her badly. Yamamoto raises an eyebrow and Koujiro licks his muzzle. He isn’t sure which one of them is more surprised to hear assent fall from his lips.

 

It is a messy, torrid affair.

They are in the showers, baptized in blood and guts and whatever filth that rains down from the skies of Milan. Yamamoto gasps as the hot water hits him and sears through his skin. Mukuro is busy pulling at his belt and wrestling him against the grimy walls.

Avila flexes like a cord of muscle against his back, a second spine that weaves left and right in time with his rolling hips. Koujiro slips on the filthy tiles, an otter who sternly reminds them this is neither the place nor time before succumbing to his partner’s fever. The Rain Guardian writhes in his grip, wet and heavy under the sluice of hot water, utterly wanton and passionate as he has never been for the Muratori head.

His trousers drop to his knees, a two-thousand one-hundred euro suit ruined before he stomps on the logistics of the rest. Yamamoto murmurs speed into the crook of his shoulders, his arms flung loosely around his neck. They aren’t quite touching yet, not skin-to-skin. But he can feel the heat that is not quite liquid through the flimsy shield of his jacket.

Yamamoto cries out, plaintive as though he is being stabbed and not fucked like he asked. Magic crackles in their veins and swells very much like the pleasures of the flesh. Mukuro comes up for a breath above the spray of water, light-headed and dizzy when the cooler air hits his lungs. His daemon bites him behind his ear, releasing poison and the sickness in his bloodstream. It is hard to tell if it is water or tears that lingers in the other man’s open gaze. But he locks eyes with Avila as though he might know what they are thinking, as though he might like to peel back the grey scales and live there.

He comes between their stomachs, a spurt of heat and stickiness hotter than the forty-something-degrees Celsius promised by the shower head. Koujiro lets out a low moan and together they both stare at Mukuro as though they might like to stop.

 

A Mafioso’s answer to violence is predictably, more violence. Mukuro Rokudo is not surprised when Hibari is finally summoned back to Italy, a price tag attached to his lovely neck, his wife and unborn offspring in tow.

‘It would be so easy...’ Avila mentions wistfully, staring at the green and scarlet flutter that is the woman’s daemon. He and Hibari exchange knowing looks before the other man ends it with a curt nod, greeting the tenth head of the Vongola family with his usual acerbity.

 

Yamamoto comes to them two days later with bottles of wine and resignation in his eyes. He stretches out on the carpet, staying still long enough to get liquored up and frustrated with the languid strokes Mukuro insists on giving him.

“In Yamamoto clan,” he slurs, voice abused from the shots of whisky he forced upon him. Koujiro lets out a small sigh and kicks out with his spindly limbs, knocking over an empty cup. “The women serve and men kill.” He blinks and laughs with a touch of despondency, “I have no idea why I just said that.”

“Do you require assistance getting back to your room?” Avila says carefully, tongue flickering.

 “No, no” he waves off the offered arm and stands up, swaying like willows as he waits for Koujiro to catch up. Koujiro shifts into a wolf, black and brindled grey. He yawns, showing all of his pointed teeth as he butts heads with Avila in a spurt of unexpected affection, allowing his human counterpart to lean on his solid form. Yamamoto grins at him, lopsided and a little sad. “Thanks anyways.”

 

Koujiro sits on Yamamoto’s lap, stocky and quilled, not at all like the usual forms he likes to take. His eyes are dull and glazed and he is slightly dehydrated from last night’s binge drinking. Mukuro doesn’t know what that says about Hibari Kyouya who let himself be subdued by one drunk man.

“Is it worth it?”

Mukuro feels like a man at the confessional, spouting secrets before an unexpected end. The Rain Guardian starts a little before settling. Wryly, Mukuro hands him a bottle of water and several pills if only to save his shoes.

“I owe him my life.”

Mukuro scoffs, “Even the esteemed head of the Muratori family would not want this. If I know him at all, he would never allow this.”

Yamamoto turns away. Koujiro says thoughtfully,

“It is not our duty to give him what he wants but what he needs.”

 

There is magic thrumming in his blood, always.

When Yamamoto’s spill out of him in a shocking spray of red, he puts a palm over the too many bullets holes and begins to pray.

Witches have gods but no religion that men recognize. Mukuro is a witch, but he was a man first and he prays to whoever is the most convenient as he covers Yamamoto with his body as a shield, only Avila’s hissing reminding him that he is a witch and he has magic—now is the time to use it.

The gunshots are wild, rampant. He sees at least one bullet graze Koujiro’s ear before he takes Vastro’s head off of his shoulders. The brutality of the act is almost mesmerizing in its wrongfulness. Riina, the sly trickster, barely bats an eye as he empties his pistol into Koujiro’s massive bulk, his rat daemon barely hanging off his bouncing elbow.

“Mukuro.” Avila chides, using a tone she hasn’t used since his birth. Power gathers beneath his palms and he can feel the fabric of the universe tear just a bit as the delicate strands tying Yamamoto to their reality from the next snaps one by one. “There is.” Mukuro retorted sharply, ripping off his gloves with his teeth. He cups Yamamoto’s face with bare hands and the other man blinks up in surprise. “Come with me.”

Chrome will be safer here, protected by the most powerful Mafioso with wandering eyes. She would outlive whatever their world threw at him, in time she and Dante will outlive him and Avila.

A shadow falls over them and immediately, his hand flies to the dagger strapped around his ankle. But it is only Koujiro, who sways with a sleepy uncertainty. There is blood on his lips and gunfire has ceased. The only other survivor, a grim-faced veteran of thirty, goes over to the other side to see if anyone still lives. The bear-shaped daemon lets out a short whistle and a gusty sigh, fat and gristle melting off his car-sized frame. And as though the little Akita he molds from dust is too difficult to maintain, he shrinks even further down into a crimson-faced swallow, small enough to fit on the palm of his hand.

“Mukuro” he murmurs longingly.

Yamamoto, eyes vacant, smiles.


End file.
